BriteVerify: An Inexpensive Tool for Shaping Up Your Email List

Posted September 23, 2014 | Laura Christianson

If you’ve been collecting names and emails for your e-newsletter and are now ready to begin using them, it’s a good idea to verify that the emails are valid before you import them to your e-newsletter list.

Why?

Because most email marketing services (such as MailChimp, AWeber, and Constant Contact) base their monthly fees on the total number of subscribers.

For example, here are some of the current monthly rates for three major email marketing services:

MailChimp

0 – 2000 and 12,000 emails – free

0 – 500 with unlimited emails – $10/m

501 – 1000 with unlimited emails – $15/m

1001 – 1500 with unlimited emails – $20/m

1501 – 2000 with unlimited emails – $25/m

2001 – 2500 – $ 30/m

2501 – 2600 – $35/m

2601 – 2700 – $40/m

AWeber

0 – 500 – $19/m with first month for $1

2501 – 5000 – $30/m

5001 – 10000 – $50/m

10001 – 25,000 – $130/m

Constant Contact

0 – 500 – $45/m

501 – 2500 – $60/m

2501 – 5000 – $80/m

5001 – 10000 – $110/m

I’m not certain how much these services charge you for doing a bulk upload of, say, 2000 addresses when 300 of the addresses are invalid. Do they charge you for adding 2000 subscribers to your list or only for the 1700 valid addresses?

Frankly, I don’t want to find out. I’d rather upload a nice, clean list of emails I’m sure will work.

How BriteVerify Works

To get that nice, clean list, I recommend BriteVerify. (They are not paying me to say this, nor am I an affiliate.) In one case, my team verified about 5000 addresses for a client who’d been using a terrible, outdated email service that kept “eating” her mailing list. She was fairly certain that nearly half the emails on her list were defunct, and she was right. After we ran her list through BriteVerify, she ended up with 2800 valid addresses.

In another case, a client passively collected e-mail addresses from people who asked to be added to his mailing list. A couple of years later, he decided to begin sending out an e-newsletter. We ran 1200 addresses through BriteVerify and discovered that 22% (261 addresses) were invalid.

It took BriteVerify less than two minutes to verify 1200 addresses and it costs only 1 cent per verification for up to 250K addresses. I uploaded files from an Excel spreadsheet, but they also offer options for drag & drop and uploading via FTP, email, or cloud storage sites like Dropbox, Google Drive, and box.com.

When the emails I ran through BriteVerify were verified, the service provided me with an Excel spreadsheet that listed all the valid addresses. They also emailed me a report like the sample below, which provided helpful statistics on the percentage of valid and invalid addresses.

BriteVerifyReport

Quick. Simple. Inexpensive. Efficient. Gotta love it.

[Tweet “Why you should verify email addresses BEFORE importing them to your email service”]

Question

Have you considered using an email verification service? For what purpose would you use this tool?

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